After hardening: Apple donates iPhone 17 to civil society organisations
With A19 and A19 Pro, Apple introduces memory integrity verification, which should better prevent complex attacks. Corresponding devices are now being donated.
Apple wants to protect activists from spyware like that of the NSO Group.
(Image: T. Schneider/Shutterstock.com)
Apple has announced a continuation of its cybersecurity grant program for members of civil society. The previous program offered 10 million US dollars to organizations that help activists, journalists, and civil rights activists to defend themselves against targeted spyware attacks (so-called highly targeted mercenary spyware) or to investigate such attacks. According to Apple, a "special initiative" is now planned. This will involve the targeted distribution of iPhone 17 devices to people from civil society who are at risk—a total of 1000 units, the company said in a statement.
MIE is designed to ward off advanced attacks
Like all iPhones of this vintage, the iPhone 17 has a new memory protection function known as Memory Integrity Enforcement, or MIE for short. It should also be able to prevent complex exploit chains that take advantage of memory errors in good time. The hardware component required for this is located in the A19 and A19 Pro, which is installed in the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and Air. According to Apple, it was also possible to stop attacks via the speculative CPU instruction execution such as Spectre V1 without this being accompanied by a drop in performance. New protective measures are also included in iOS 26, but they only take full effect with the new devices.
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“To quickly make this revolutionary and industry-leading defense available to members of civil society who may be targeted by spyware, we will provide thousands of iPhone 17 devices to civil society organizations that can distribute them to vulnerable users,” the company writes. Further details on the distribution process—such as which organizations receive devices and how—Apple has not yet announced. “This initiative reflects our ongoing commitment to bring our most advanced security measures to those who need them most,” the iPhone manufacturer continued.
Catching spyware at an early stage
MIE combines different approaches to prevent malware from entering memory areas it is not allowed to access. According to Apple, an offensive research team was also involved in the development of MIE, which also attacked the system in practice over five years and hardened it against the attacks found.
Various real-world attack scenarios described by Apple—via iMessage, Safari, and kernel exploits—could be prevented by MIE, which raises hopes that gaps can be intercepted very early on in the exploit chain. Exploitable memory errors repeatedly occur in code, even after extensive auditing.
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